Easy Die Cutting

This lesson teaches a lot of different ways to use dies other than just cutting the images out for a card…you can dry emboss, deboss, stencil, create dimension, etc. The technique I chose to highlight can be a bit tricky — using the negative images of dies rather than the positive.

I started with the beautiful Altenew Wallpaper Art Stamp and Die set. Three gorgeous flowers and three different leaf arrangements. Since I was going to use the leaves as the background I took my 4 1/4″ x 5 1/2″ piece of white cardstock and laid out where the leaves would go. When I cut them out I needed to be sure I was saving all the negative pieces of this cut to be sure the complete outlines of the leaves would show.

Next I took some textured green paper for the background cutting it to 4 1/4″ x 5 1/2″ to match the card base. Since now both pieces were the same size I trimed 1/4″ off the end and side of the white to make it 4″x 5 1/4″. I mounted my negative die cut with some foam tape, giving some depth to the leaves. This was the tricky part as there were some very small areas to put tape behind. I continued to cut my foam tape into all the little nooks and protrusions that needed some support to make the white card part be secure. This was actually the trickiest and most time consuming part of the card. Once the large white piece was on the green I found the small pieces to complete the outlines and put foam tape on them as well. There are some extremely small pieces of negative that help define the outlines of the leaves. For these tiny pieces I could not add foam tape but rather kept them in the die cut, added just a touch of Gina K Connect glue, then positioned the whole cut in its position and pushed down then tiny pieces with my tweezers to mount them directly on the green paper. When I took the cut out, these then showed the outline of the leaves. Phew, the leaves were done!

I stamped all three of the Wallpaper Art flowers with Simon Says Intense Black Ink and also stamped one of the leaves. I love the Altenew Artist Markers and find it very relaxing to just play with them and color away. To test which colors I want for both flowers and leaves, I would write the number of the color with the fine point of the marker on the same cardstock I just stamped the outlines. I really wanted the flower to stand out against the background so I chose Artist Markers R206 Crimson, R318 Ruby Red, and R217 Velvet. First using the Crimson I colored the whole flower, then with Ruby Red and Velvet I added some shading to the petals to show some depth. Following that I again used Crimson to blend and go over all the flower again. The yellow center is Y205 Warm Sunshine. For the leaves I used G935 Moss then used the clear to add some variance to the color. I also colored a stem with the Moss.

Finishing off the card was now easy as I glued the stem and the colored leaves in place. Remember I said I wanted the flower to stand out? I popped it up off the card more with some foam tape. It is STRIKING! The sentiment came from the same stamp set.

I had a lot of fun trying some tricky moves with the white base and pulling this whole card together. It is very impressive to use the negative dies this way. I wonder what other dies I can use like this also? Gotta go. My stash is calling, looking for the next project.